


we built this city

by Fahye



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: General Arthurian Nonsense, Loyalty, M/M, Multi, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-14
Updated: 2016-07-14
Packaged: 2018-07-23 21:41:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7481076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fahye/pseuds/Fahye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"As you keep pointing out, I've died twice," said Gansey. He was so bright that Henry almost wanted to look away from him, and so compelling that he couldn't. "I don't care what I'm <i>supposed</i> to be doing."</p>
            </blockquote>





	we built this city

In a glorious old house standing astride a corpse road, a tree and a resurrected king and a magician and a dreamer are having a party.

Oh, Henry Cheng is there, too.

But there's nothing very interesting about _that._

* * *

**(some time to do the things we never had)**

"Jesus H Christ, Ganseyboy. Here's a quiz. Name _one_ pop artist currently releasing music."

Blue gave a little choke of a laugh. Henry twisted around in the passenger seat so that he could look at Gansey's face, which predictably assumed an expression somewhere between withering and polite. Gansey was smart enough to realise that taking the question seriously would be letting himself in for more teasing; he flashed one of his old-money smiles at Henry and said, "The Beach Boys."

"Disqualified," said Henry. He turned back around and flicked through the playlists on his phone. "Dr Seuss's sound system belongs to me and me alone."

So it turned out that spending the formative years of one's youth chasing myths and magic around the countryside, and spending the rest of the time marinating in the atmosphere of distilled and timeless ambition that was Aglionby Academy, led to a group of boys whose grasp of music centred on some inexplicable vegetable-based techno that was apparently the song of Ronan Lynch's darkly grinning soul.

Blue wasn't much better. Blue liked a whole pile of Scandinavian bands that Henry suspected nobody outside the psychic community had ever heard of. And sure, they were pretty or interesting or clever, but they made for a _shit awful_ roadtrip soundtrack. Henry had disqualified her before they were half a day out of Henrietta.

Three decades back was a good compromise. There was plenty of suitable material in the 80s. They could always work their way forward from there.

Henry hit play.

Trees sped by on either side. Blue tapped her hands on the steering wheel, eyes sparkling and open to let the world pour into them. Air bustled through the open windows of the car and caught at bits of her hair, tugging and teasing it to come out and play. RoboBee was perched on the dashboard, artificial wings trembling in the same breeze. Occasionally Henry's phone beeped, giving him an obscure fact about a town or natural phenomenon or landmark nearby. He read these out in what Gansey had not yet realised was Henry's version of Gansey's lecture-voice.

From the back seat came the lower-pitched beep of Gansey's phone.

"Adam says Ronan wants to know who inflicted that name on his car."

" _His_ car," said Blue, mock-affronted.

"Wait until it breaks down," Gansey said, "then it'll be _our_ car."

Henry had to laugh, had to stick his hand out of his own window and feel the air play around his fingers like water. He was in an impossible car, driving into an unknown lazy future, with a girl whose father got his energy from photosynthesis. And with the only person Henry had ever looked at and felt the urge to follow instead of lead.

Another beep.

"Ha. _Don't bother, he knows it was Cheng_ ," Gansey read.

It had been the smallest of leaps, once Blue and Henry were deep in excited discussion about the environmentally friendly and engine-less Camaro, for them to stop vaguely referring to it as _the green Pig_ and move to _green eggs & ham_, which didn't exactly roll off the tongue in a way suitable for everyday use. Dr Seuss was the inevitable endpoint.

"He's got a point," said Blue.

"Eyes on the road, Wendybird," said Henry.

Blue made a face, but said nothing. Henry shrugged. He had no problem spending his time, like the first man in Eden, naming and renaming the world around him. He'd done it to everyone in Litchfield House. Spoken words had always seemed ridiculous to Henry. It didn't matter at all which ones you pinned to someone; why not have fun with it?

He turned up the volume. They left a stream of music in the air behind them, like the smell of magic.

* * *

When the door opens, Gansey is running his fingers critically through the straight-up style of Henry's hair and Blue has her forehead buried in Henry's arm, laughing, her hand tangled in his.

Ronan stands there, holding the door handle.

"Hey there, Lynch," says Henry.

Gansey clears his throat in a way that means he's made a decision on behalf of the group, and grabs hold of Henry's other hand with his own. There's something combative about the action.

"Here's a truth for you," Gansey says. Wary humour simmers in his voice.

"Shit," says Ronan, stepping back to let them in. The start of a smile is visible before he turns and leads the way into the house. His bare heels flash beneath the cuffs of his jeans. "Now I owe Parrish twenty bucks."

Henry's been away from Henrietta for a long time, wrapped up in Gansey and Blue like a crocheted quilt that's easy to poke one's fingers through and wiggle; an end of the yarn comfortably connected to this town, vaguely tethered, but distant enough to forget. One of the things he's forgotten is that he is a young country in this continent of theirs. He lacks history. He's not spent any time in the Barns; he had to raise his eyebrows when Blue first called it that, and have it explained to him. So he doesn't know what to make of the slight, defiant self-consciousness evident in the way that Ronan leads them through the house.

"I like what you've done with the place," Henry says anyway, directing the words to the curl of ink on the back of Ronan's neck.

It's the right thing to say. Ronan's shoulders lower by an inch.

It's not like Henry's lying. He doesn't do that, much, and he wouldn't do it to Ronan, by whom he wants--strangely, desperately--to be liked. The main building of the Barns has a _homeness_ leaking out of the walls, and the rooms are stuffed with a colour and a light that Henry would never have guessed at, based on the Ronan Lynch he sat behind for three years' worth of English Lit. The sofas in the living room are russet red and worn in patches, friendly like a well-loved pair of jeans. Perched on the back of one armchair is Chainsaw. Perched on another is the girl Opal, with matching red ribbons tied around her ankles just before they thicken out into fetlocks. She is drawing something, with great concentration, on the patiently outstretched palm of Adam Parrish.

The whole thing is a tableau so striking it borders on the surreal. Henry, who has dropped Blue's hand but not yet been allowed to surrender Gansey's, feints with his free hand towards the pocket which holds his phone. He won't be able to capture it before it dissolves.

Chainsaw opens her beak and makes a long, rough noise like her namesake slowed down. Adam and Opal look up, in a unison that settles itself under Henry's skin. He thinks of black-and-white movies, early animation. Opal and Chainsaw. Adam Parrish fits into it too, somehow. With his far-off eyes he is almost as otherworldly as the other figments of Ronan's need. It would be totally unsurprising for there to be horns hidden in the thatch of his hair, or for wings to erupt from between his shoulderblades.

"Hey," says Adam, looking somehow at all four of them at once.

"Hey yourself." Blue dashes forward to hug him. They look like a poster proclaiming the end of some war or other: her feet leaving the ground entirely, Adam's face smushed into her hair.

By the time Adam's put her down again, Gansey is there, extending a fist. Adam looks into Gansey's face for a long moment, as though studying a map, and then bumps his fist against Gansey's. Something about the gesture is almost more intimate than the way his arms had wrapped all the way around Blue's torso. Gansey nods, when it's done.

"Mom says you guys had a bad storm last weekend," Blue says to Ronan.

Ronan shrugs. "Blew over by the time my flight got in."

Adam having sweated and bled his way into Harvard, Ronan travels there often. Opal, when Ronan is out of Henrietta, stays at 300 Fox Way. At some point in the last couple of months, Gwenllian figured out how to use a cell phone camera, and for a while Blue's lock screen was an angled selfie: Opal with a blue paper hat perched solemnly on her white locks, and Gwenllian giving one of her more alarming smiles, her arm looped around the girl's shoulders.

Gansey grins at Ronan, a tease with no teeth to it. "Still can't see the appeal of the place?"

Ronan smirks and leans against a door frame. "It's Aglionby with more drinking and sex," he says, dismissing the hallowed halls of Henry's Ivy League future with a flap of one hand.

"And girls," Adam puts in.

" _Girls_."

"It's relevant to some of us." Adam's got a smile on his face that Henry has never seen before. Wider, and unpolished. Very obviously for Ronan's eyes alone.

"Girls," Ronan says again, just as obnoxiously, but with some self-awareness swimming beneath it. Blue skips a long way to the side in order to jab him in the arm, and Ronan responds by dragging her by the wrist into something too violent to be called a hug.

"Ronan!" Blue smiles and thrashes out with her sharp elbows.

Gansey turns to Adam with the air of a society hostess deciding to ignore the brawl that's broken out in her ornamental fountain.

"How are _you_ finding it?" Gansey says. "You're still working at the bike shop?"

"And the coffee shop." Adam narrows his eyes. "Don't get any ideas, Gansey."

" _Two_ jobs--" Gansey pauses, clearly on his way to a diatribe about how Adam can't possibly be giving his studies or his social life the attention they deserve. But he's been living with Blue, more or less, for six months now.

"Two jobs." Adam adds, rich with irony, "I get free coffee. And discount bike parts."

"He bikes everywhere. All the rich kids in his classes are in love with him," Ronan says, halfway between smug and contented. His folded hands rest atop Blue's head, and his chin atop his hands.

Adam rolls his eyes and goes into the kitchen, bumping the back of his knuckles against Ronan's shoulder on his way through the door. There's the sound of cupboards opening, glasses clinking.

"You're not joking, are you," says Henry.

"He doesn't notice a fucking thing," says Ronan.

It's not surprising. Adam Parrish, with his deadly freckled cheekbones and his elegant wrists, the way he unconsciously wears his battered jeans as though he paid $600 for someone to distress them by hand, is catnip to a certain species of person. Henry's not immune. He just prefers people with easier smiles, on the whole; easier laughter. And he's got an embarrassment of romantic riches going on here, so it's not like he'd ever _do_ anything about it, even if the very idea of trying to steal something from Ronan Lynch didn't make a chilly sweat break out on Henry's palms.

* * *

**(can't you hear the thunder)**

"You don't like sitting in the backs of cars, do you?" said Blue.

Gansey looked up. Henry met his eyes.

"No," Henry said. "Bluegum, I think it's story time."

He'd already forgotten the name of the town they were in. Some abstract noun or other, population not many. They'd pulled Dr Seuss up in a tiny dirt parking lot near an even tinier park which held a set of rusting play equipment, the slide almost queasily liquid-bright in the sun, and a wooden picnic bench. They were lying in the grass off to one side of the bench. It was one of the unspoken rules of the road trip: deviation, from what was expected and what was easiest, in small doses. It meant that they would always veer around furniture in favour of the sparse, tender grass, even if Gansey did throw the occasional fussy glance at the table like he was worried about hurting its feelings.

Henry leaned back against a tree, deliberately relaxed his shoulders, and told Blue the story of why staring at the back of a car seat brought up memories of stammering through a script with a phone pushed, too hard, against his ear. For three years afterwards he couldn't say f-f-f-finger without his voice ripping the front end of the word to shreds. It spread and infected other words too. He'd had the best speech therapists money could buy, and the stammer shriveled up under the merciless light of their expertise, but sometimes Henry could still taste it lurking in his mouth.

"Shit," Blue said, when he was done. "That sounds awful. Sorry." Looking right at him, in the serious way she had. Talking to Blue was always easy; it had been that way since the toga party, that bizarre night when Henry had felt more attuned than usual to things outside of his own comfortable circle, jolted and alarmed into something delightfully new. Blue Sargent, who'd talked about Venezuela and sea turtles and Iceland and how she felt her fear of insignificance like a set of spikes beneath her sternum; and then, two days later, refused to get into his car at the bus stop. Blue Sargent with her sharp little chin and a freckle right between her collarbones that Henry dreamed about, sometimes.

"Yeah," Henry said, and that was that.

It wasn't like he _couldn't_ sit in the back seat. Just like he _could_ exist in small, dark spaces, if he wanted to.

A car rolled by, lazily enough that it was overtaken by a pair of children on bicycles and another on a scooter behind, small legs pumping, heads bare, curious glances spared for the unfamiliar Camaro and the trio of strangers. Henry had his phone out. He snapped a picture when the kids were far enough away to be no more than silhouettes against the old, creamy stone of the church on the corner. Then he took a picture of Blue, chewing thoughtfully at a blade of grass, legs brown and stubbly emerging from a denim skirt which she'd hemmed and patched in bold shades of orange. He managed to press the button just before she turned her head and saw him. Humour and exasperation battled in the corner of her mouth, tucked into her cheek like an omen of things to come. Blue was so many mysteries, but she was never unreadable. Just a kind of puzzle room of a person. Rewarding your effort. Promising an untangling, in the end.

"Who's that one going to?" she asked.

"Cheng Two," Henry said. "I think Mrs Woo would appreciate it too, she said some very approving things about your fashion sense the other day, but Two is a legs guy."

Blue flipped him an amiable bird and flopped back into the grass.

"I'd defend her honour," Gansey explained, "only she doesn't need me to."

"Good boy," said Henry.

Blue was laughing by now. "You two are the _worst._ "

"Besides," said Gansey, shrugging. "They're good legs, Jane."

Henry only ever sent a photo to one person, sometimes accompanied by a brief message, sometimes not. Some of them went to Litchfield House people, and some went to his sisters. In a rash moment he'd sent one to his mother; she'd told him in reply, with her usual long-distance acuity, that this was not what she had in mind when she asked him to keep an eye on the Gansey boy.

That picture was of Gansey sprawled on the hood of Dr Seuss, polo shirt rucked up, one hand resting on a triangle of bare stomach, sunglasses pointing at the sky and mouth loose with the echo of laughter. Henry's lips felt full, bee-stung, whenever he looked at it. He wondered why he'd sent to it his _mother_ , of all people, but maybe her habit of setting herself over his eyes like a critical pair of glasses was exactly why.

Thumbing back through the photos of Gansey in Henry's already bursting phone folder was like piecing together a 3D image from flat angles. It took Henry a while to realise that what he was trying to capture was Gansey's new mixture of fear and guilt and freedom. A portrait of a boy suddenly given life where he had resigned himself to the lack of it.

The first time Henry managed to capture Blue's feelings about Gansey's continued existence, painted across her face like zinc cream as she gazed at him, he felt a glow of accomplishment. That photo, he sent to Ronan Lynch; he felt odd about it, but also wanted to open the line of communication, given how much of _Ronan_ and _Adam_ casually peppered Blue and Gansey's speech. It was harder, from a distance, but Henry was good at making friends, and he'd been through enough already with Lynch and Parrish that he could plunge past a certain amount of assumed intimacy. And he was going to return to Henrietta another full six months behind the eight ball if he didn't make an effort.

Every single one of Henry's sisters told him to get Instagram, and he considered it, but he liked this better. It was a good game, deciding which pictures to send to whom. Casually curating the version of the story that each person saw.

* * *

Ronan sends Opal to her room when the alcohol comes out. She goes without argument, but the sullen thud of her satyr-hooves as she climbs the stairs tells them exactly what she thinks of this treatment.

"Look at you," says Blue, "setting boundaries like a responsible parent."

"No drinking until she's at _least_ thirteen," says Ronan. Gansey gives a little splutter into the neck of his beer bottle before he catches the joke. Adam is smirking.

"Wait," says Gansey, "how are we calculating her age, anyway?"

Henry laughs and tilts his head up to demand attention from Blue as she navigates an obstacle course of sprawled boys' legs, crossing to an armchair from the kitchen with a glass in her hand. She leans the little way down and kisses him off-centre. Her lips taste like a new kind of gloss.

" _Well_ ," says Adam. His eyes are on Gansey, but he clicks his fingers in Ronan's direction

"Yeah, yeah, twenty bucks," Ronan says lazily. "Calm your tits, Parrish, I don't have it _on_ me."

"I think I need to know the exact terms of this," says Henry. "Was it _if_ or _when_?"

Ronan shoots one of his charcoal smiles at Henry and just says, "So, you off to Harvard too, Cheng?"

Henry nods; his applications were _kickass_ , he could have gone _anywhere_. He accepted and then deferred Harvard over Princeton solely because of Gansey, a fact which his parents do not need to know.

"What about you, bro?" Ronan says. "Still thinking about taking classes?"

Blue curls her legs underneath herself and makes a face. "Maybe. I'll think about that when I've got a job."

"And when she's decided how best to save the world," says Gansey. "Which environmental nonprofit will be stealing you away from me, Jane?"

Blue says, loftily, "Henry and I made a shortlist."

"To Boston," says Ronan, lifting his bottle in a toast.

There's a bite to Ronan's words. Henry watches Gansey chew his lip with worry over it, then stand abruptly and go over to one of the windows, peering out into blackness. Gansey leans against the window and takes another slow sip of his drink. He looks relaxed until your eyes land on his fingers.

Henry pauses a moment to make sure Blue isn't claiming this one, but she's watching the room of raven boys with a possessive, self-deprecating contentment, bare feet drawn up, picking at the chipped polish on her toenails. Henry gets to his feet and joins Gansey by the window. The reflected interior of the room is like a fairy court, dimly imprinted on the external world, distorted in places by barely-visible trees.

"Marco," Henry says.

Gansey takes a breath and flashes a taut smile at Henry. His eyes are warm like antique wood. Another breath, this one steadier. "Polo."

Here's the thing that both of them know and neither of them are saying: Gansey has replaced being afraid of his death with being afraid of his future. Not in the same way, of course. He's no longer hurtling towards a _literal_ deadline wrapped in the tapestry of his learning. This is a fear of uncertainty, a fear of drifting unanchored: a dilute, and normal, kind of fear. Which doesn't make it any easier to handle.

Henry breaks eye contact, a gesture that he wishes weren't quite so obviously submissive. He looks back at the window, inspecting their fairy selves, making sure his stance is casual. He's got just as much practice as Gansey at pretending that the air hasn't gone tight in his chest. That was how they tripped into friendship in the first place, wasn't it? Like calling to like, on Raven Day. It's one of the starkest memories of Henry's life, how amazing and awful it was to see Richard Gansey the Third, of all people, so scared.

When Henry looks at Gansey these days something clicks into focus; he sees him so clearly that it seems unbelievable the others _don't_. Oh, they can see some parts of him, well enough to argue with and to love, but not others. It's something about that Gansey family voice. The voice makes things happen, by asking or commanding, and most people in this room have always let it convince them that Gansey knew what he was doing even when he was shaking apart.

And in the same way, they'd believed Gansey when Gansey told them all there was no way to save him, and so they'd gathered around his corpse like a group of tragic haystacks, moaning about how there was nothing they could do, like they were _normal people_ , like they weren't _incredible_ , stuffed so full of impossibility they might as well have been leaking it into the air.

That voice of Gansey's is a fucking double-edged sword.

Spoken words, man. Henry's never cared for them. He uses his _eyes._ And even then the actual words of any language, written down, still try to confuse him. It's easier with particular fonts. It's easier with a phone than a book. He doesn't know why.

"Sargent, your turtle doves are cooing in a corner," says Ronan.

Gansey turns fully back around, eyebrows raised in blatant contempt. Ronan grins at him.

"Jealous, Lynch?" Gansey says.

"Sure," Ronan drawls. "Who doesn't dream of waking up to Sonic the Hedgehog and a cranky midget?"

"Your loss," says Blue.

Adam looks like he wants to add something, but he hides it behind one hand instead. His shoulders tremble with laughter.

Gansey wraps his hand briefly around Henry's neck, a deliberate dip of fingertips beneath the edge of Henry's collar, before going to sit down again. Ronan gives Henry one of the most suggestive looks Henry has ever seen on another human being's face. Henry manages, barely, not to trip over his confused arousal as he sits.

Ronan Lynch hates calling or texting people; he wants to be _seen_ , he wants to say everything without saying anything at all. Henry remembers being fucking delighted when he first realised this. It makes Ronan invigorating to be around, like the opposite of a black star, emitting things from one end of the spectrum to the other. The part of Henry that saw Adam's gnawing hunger straight away, and recognised something of himself in it, can also see the appeal in Ronan's endless _giving_.

A bit.

Well, no, not really.

Adam and Ronan are a fascinating system of forces, but they're much too intense for normal living. It clearly suits them. One day they'll settle, but for the moment they live cities apart and so they run on high octane longing; they keep fusing and separating and feeding on the energy of it.

Henry likes to watch the system, but trying to exist inside it would give him hives.

He watches them now. Ronan is cradling a drink as he sits on the floor between Adam's knees, Adam running a slow and absent hand over Ronan's head. Ronan's eyes fall closed. There's an expression on his face that makes Henry catch Blue's eye and exchange a moment of silent amusement that isn't really amusement at all.

"Jealous?" says Ronan, without opening his eyes.

Blue's laughter is like the crackle of candy on an outstretched tongue.

Adam drops his hands to Ronan's shoulders; Ronan catches one and holds it, turning his head to kiss Adam's fingers. His brow is smooth and his mouth has a worshipful cast. Henry has a weird moment of dissonance, trying to reconcile the tempestuous oilslick of a boy that was Ronan Lynch at Aglionby with this calmly demonstrative young man.

He remembers, like a static shock, Adam's fist smashing past Ronan's face and into solid treebark. Ronan's raw voice. _Jesus, it's going to break his hands._

* * *

**(the rain's gonna fall on you)**

Henry had never stayed in a motel in his life, before their road trip. But for Blue, freshly escaped from Henrietta, the joy of not-home was just as new and fizzy and exhilarating for her as it had been for seven-year-old Henry on his first dreamy collapse into a five-star bed with a view of city lights, sweeping his limbs around to make an invisible angel in the sheets. Blue was just as cheerful, just as curious, faced with a succession of clean faded bedspreads and worn carpets, televisions with free-to-air only and half the channels unreliable or staticky.

Some nights they booked separate rooms but more often than not, given Blue's insistence on paying her way, they went for a single room with two double beds. Henry spent a lot of time 'getting fresh air', or else sitting in diners editing his photos and flirting refills of his root beer out of waitresses for whom he then left fifty-dollar tips on principle.

He didn't know how much these deliberate absences had actually allowed to happen between Blue and Gansey--a general sense for people suggested to him that they hadn't gotten much further than kissing--but it seemed important to make the effort nonetheless. The very fact that they'd dragged him along on this trip was unlikely. Henry hardly ever had occasion to think of himself as unwanted, but there was a difference between that and _extraneous_. It was a matter of poor timing: Gansey, being the kind of proto-politician to know the value in cementing an alliance soon after its beginning, had found himself shaping two relationships at once.

Well. That wasn't fair. Blue Sargent wasn't the type to keep her mouth shut if anything about a plan wasn't to her liking.

Sometimes Henry stared at colourless ceilings and turned it over in his mind, like a Rubik's cube he had no real intention of solving, but mostly he accepted this year, this trip, as a good thing that the world had handed him, stapled on to the list of things he'd been handed recently. An unexpected adventure. A ready-made parcel of bizarre friends. Blue. And Gansey, Gansey, the blazing red squares of the cube.

The ceiling of this particular motel room was an extra special brand of colourless. When Henry switched on the bedside lamp, the room was flooded with washed-out yellow, and smudges on the wall became shadows which nervously attracted the eye.

"You okay, man?" Henry said, after a moment.

Gansey was working himself upright against the pillows, breathing through slightly parted lips. On his other side, Blue sat up as well. Not many people could have slept through the strangled shout, and there'd been some soft jerking sounds that suggested Gansey was moving around. He might have kicked her awake.

"Fine, thank you," said Gansey. It said something about Gansey that his courtesy, his company-voice, was what came to the fore when he wasn't sure where he was. That he woke up already halfway to pretense.

"Gansey," said Blue. She put a hand on his cheek. Her hair stuck in every direction and the oversized shirt she wore as pajamas was slipping off one shoulder.

"I'll get some water," said Henry, kicking off his covers.

"Ugh." Gansey shook his head. Now he sounded gruff. Closer to real. "Sorry I woke you."

Blue rolled her eyes and didn't dignify that with a response. Henry sat on the edge of their bed with the glass, hastily filled at the tap. The light in the room changed with a sudden eerie gleam of headlights through the curtains. There was a crunch of parking lot gravel as the car turned around. A couple of voices exchanged shouts, mild and unintelligible, like half-hearted carnival stallholders heard from a long way off, and then both light and sound died away.

Henry handed over the water and put a hand on Gansey's bent knee, calming. He was startled by a pulse, a tiny one, flicking urgently against his thumb. The speed wasn't startling, just the sensation. One of Gansey's ankles was tangled in the sheet.

Gansey took a gulp of water and set the glass down. "It was a battle this time," he said. "It might have been Bryn Glas. We were holding-- _he_ was holding a slope, facing downhill. The other army marching into arrow fire. I read about it, I think." Frustration surged beneath his voice. "It felt so familiar. Where's my notebook?"

"At the bottom of my bag," said Henry. He applied a little pressure, when movement suggested that Gansey was about to leap out of bed in search. "In the car. You can look at it in the morning."

"Familiar," Gansey said again. "Like I'd been there before. Like I knew where the next wave was going to come from, where our flank was weak."

"Dreams are good at that feeling," said Blue.

Gansey looked sidelong at her. It was a sharp look, for Gansey, who usually looked at Blue like she'd not only hung the moon but shaped it herself from glitter and clay.

" _You_ know better then that," he said.

"I'm trying to help," she shot back.

"Thank you," Gansey said, with glass in his voice. " _Platitudes_."

"Don't you dare patronise me, Richard Gansey!"

Henry tightened his grip on Gansey's leg. His stomach felt unpleasant. "Hey."

"No, _patronising_ is trying to pretend that this is something less than what it is!"

" _Hey_."

Gansey and Blue both looked at him. In the yellow light they were large and loud and over-emphasised, somehow, like text made furious by a highlighter. Henry wondered what he looked like, to them. The silence buzzed in his ears. RoboBee was settled atop Henry's phone, the slight red glow of its sleep-mode eyes like tiny holes pricked in skin, and Henry half-expected it to flicker awake in response to his mood. But it didn't; no threat here.

No threat.

Under Henry's gaze they shrank down and became themselves again.

Gansey rubbed at his face. "Sorry," he sighed.

It wasn't Henry's anger to have, but it burned in him anyway. He knew enough by now to know that Gansey used to have a clear story driving him forward: ancient kings and learning Welsh and believing in the _size_ of it. Having it swept away had left him…scooped out. Lighter, freer, but totally adrift. Someone who had always known their fundamental self, suddenly not knowing anything at all. And now those dreams, those flashes, halfway between mocking reminder and uneasy promise.

Gansey would spend hours flicking through his notebook with a troubled look on his face, searching for things he couldn't possibly have invented. Usually he found them buried in the record of his own research. Sometimes, he didn't.

Sometimes, Henry wanted to toss the book off a bridge.

Blue was chewing her lip, a stubborn and concerned look in her eyes. She passed the look over Henry like a command.

Henry leaned down and rested his chin on Gansey's knee, his arm wrapped around Gansey's bent leg. When he tilted his head to the side, the very lowest edge of his lip brushed against Gansey's warm skin.

"All hail the once and future king," he said.

"I wish you'd drop that one," Gansey said mildly. "It's the wrong mythology entirely."

"You've died twice, my liege. Once is luck, twice is a pattern."

Gansey's mouth quirked. He reached out a solemn hand and bounced his palm against the very top of Henry's hair, which was somewhat deflated from its usual glory by sleep. Henry felt it as no more than a phantom, like someone stroking his shadow. His scalp itched and he shivered his way through a brilliant urge to bow his neck, in obedience and in mischief, and open his mouth to taste the skin over Gansey's kneecap.

He didn't do it. His desires were his own business; and besides, Gansey was probably used to it. If Gansey had never seen this pupil-widening kind of itch in Lynch's eyes, in Parrish's, then he hadn't been looking closely enough.

* * *

The pizza oven is made of dark bricks, irregularly sized, the seams between them almost glowing in the floodlight rigged to illuminate the outside area. Smoke streams from the top of its chimney and thins out against the night sky, confusing the eye into thinking that the Milky Way has grown a few extra limbs.

It's cold, Virginia ice pinching bared areas of skin, but they've drunk enough by now that nobody complains about moving the party outside in the name of food. Ronan's arms are fully bare as he wrestles with the flat paddle, moving raw dough in and edge-charred flatbread out. It's a bizarre sight, and not just because of the vaguely arresting movement of his muscles and the visible edges of his tattoo. Henry, whose alcoholic blanket is not cutting it, hovers near the volcanic mouth of the oven and strokes the rough, glittery bricks.

"Did you literally dream yourself a pizza oven?" he asks.

Ronan swipes his forehead with a leather-wrapped wrist. The air smells like rosemary and also, sharp and mouth-watering, like garlic.

"There's a thing called manual labour, Cheng."

"Manual labour," says Henry, drenching his voice in Aglionby to the extent that he can, here, in the fierce joyful night air of Ronan's kingdom. "You know, I think I have heard of that. I pay people to do it for me."

After a moment, Ronan's grin slices out. "I dreamt the bricks," he says.

Henry blinks and flattens his hand on them. The oven walls are thick. The stone has a weirdly elusive warmth, half of which is probably the psychology of the sparks that flick and dance out from the glowing mouth. "Really?"

Ronan shrugs one shoulder, sending ink shifting in a way that pours the image into Henry's mind: Ronan Lynch, building with stones and with his own two hands, in the dusty quiet of noon. Ronan might be about to say something else, but Adam, with the look of a man about to step onto a highwire, comes up to them with Gansey and Blue close behind. Adam is tugging the sleeve of his sweater up past his elbow, baring a skinny forearm. Henry is no longer surprised when Ronan's gaze drags magnetically to Adam's fingers.

"Nothing," says Adam, dry as ashes, "up my sleeves."

"Parrish, you fucking showoff," Ronan murmurs. Adam blazes a look at him.

Blue has a torn-off piece of flatbread in her hands, and she chews and swallows before speaking. Her lips are shiny with oil. "Ronan, shut up and let him do the thing."

Adam closes his eyes and takes a breath and shoves his hand right into the oven.

" _Shit_ ," chokes Henry. His abortive step towards Adam is stopped by Ronan's hand coming up hard against his chest to hold him in place. Henry stares at Ronan's blunt fingernails and the ashy smudged skin of Ronan's hand and tries not to think about blisters and sizzling flesh. He can smell burning, but he could smell that before.

"Nice," says Blue.

Adam's eyelids unpeel; curled up in his irises is something glowing and languid and organic, which lasts through two more blinks. Then he gives an embarrassed twist of his lips and pulls his hand back out again. He wiggles his fingers in the cold air, then curls them tight. Henry's heart rate begins the grudging trek back to normal.

Gansey's delight has a hungry edge to it. He reaches out and closes his own palm briefly over Adam's fist, conquering rock with paper. "How does it work?"

"How does the _magic_ work?" Adam says.

Gansey removes his hand and offers Adam a politely extended middle finger instead.

Adam smiles. "I'm not like Ronan, Cabeswater won't just let me _take_. There's got to be balance. But I can choose what to do with the heat once I've deferred it." He rubs his hands together--looking, ironically enough, like an amateur magician about to ask someone to pick a card--and glances at Ronan. "Do you--"

"Yeah, yeah."

Adam frowns. "Let me finish."

"We've been over this," Ronan says. "You can do whatever. I don't care."

"That's a dangerous--"

"Adam."

" _Ronan_ ," Adam says.

Every teacher at Aglionby would have given a month's salary for the ability to declaim Ronan's voice in that firm tone and have him subside so instantly. Nobody has ever looked at Henry the way Ronan looks at Adam, and frankly Henry's not sure he wants anyone to.

"I consent to using you as a space heater, Parrish," Ronan says.

Adam hovers his palms over the twin curves of Ronan's shoulders and sets his lips into a considering line. RoboBee, which has been dormant in the pocket of Henry's hoodie, crawls over the lip of it and launches into the air. Ronan and Adam both tense, their eyes flicking to Gansey, before they realise. Neither Blue nor Gansey reacts at all.

RoboBee hovers, bobbing gently, in the air beneath Adam's hand. Henry's already worked out what's happening from the relaxation of Ronan's shoulders, the way Ronan's body gives a small and luxurious sway towards Adam. He feels the proof of it when RoboBee, now almost too warm to touch, returns to Henry's welcoming fingers.

Henry, enjoying the show but feeling half a mile behind, lifts his other hand as though in class. "All right, did Cabeswater destroy itself for Gansey or _not_?"

"Ronan dreamed a new one," says Gansey. "Did we not--no, I didn't tell you. Sorry." His face creases in genuine remorse. "We really should start a group text."

"Who taught you that?" Blue asks Adam.

"Adam," drawls Ronan, "has a _coven_."

It turns out that Calla and Maura put Adam in touch with some people in Boston, who are teaching him to expand his capabilities beyond scrying. Ronan's new version of Cabeswater, dreamed deliberately and to a purpose, is both stronger and more stable; Adam can touch it from anywhere, though it's easiest in Henrietta.

"Cheng," adds Adam, once he's explained this, "what was your robot doing?"

”It gets curious," says Henry.

Adam's brow creases. "I thought it was software-driven. Who writes the apps?"

"I do."

"You have an app for sensing magic?"

Henry shrugs. "RoboBee finds things for me. It usually knows what I want to find."

"Through what? The fingerprint interface? Cheng, that's not technology, that's _telepathy_."

"Arthur C. Clarke has some news for you, Parrish," says Henry.

Adam's mouth twitches. "One of the witches I work with in Boston would love to meet you. She's all into the fusion of technology with natural powers, and apps as spells. Can I…?" Adam flattens his palm. Whatever Opal was drawing there, when they arrived, is visible only as a messy blue smudge now. "I can do some of that sensing thing myself. I want to see if it feels like magic, or like something else."

There's that a suggestion of movement around Adam's pupils again, part of him still hooked into Cabeswater, as RoboBee wanders up and down his lifeline. Leyline, lifeline. Live and lie. Henry flicks curiously through those apps that rely on the bee's input, looking for anything new.

"It's familiar," Adam says finally. "No, not familiar. Cabeswater's not sure about it. _Kinship_."

"Niall Lynch," says Henry, still flicking. "He dreamed it in the first place."

The others have been watching with interest up to this point. Now Ronan shifts, at the sound of his father's name, and Gansey clears his throat. Henry wants to try something.

"Yo, Plantagenet, can you let RoboBee have a look at you, while I've got him tuned in?"

Gansey reaches out for the tiny robot, and Henry is proud of him, for how casual the gesture is. Gansey's fingers brush Adam's palm as he gently scoops RoboBee away. On the screen of Henry's phone, a pink line spikes dramatically. Henry's about to say something, but then Adam grabs Gansey's wrist and inhales like a gunshot. RoboBee gives a red flash of alarm and goes very still, only the slightest twitch of antenna moving in Gansey's grasp. Forest shadows boil in Adam's eyes.

"What's going on?" says Adam. "I can feel--Gansey, what the hell?"

"We've been trying to work that out, actually," says Gansey slowly. "Adam. The new Cabeswater, is it the same…?"

"Close enough for government work, according to Calla." Adam and Gansey are having a rapid conversation with their eyes that, for once, Henry isn't following any better than the verbal one. "It wouldn't recognise me as its sacrifice, otherwise."

"Can you find out what it did to me?"

"I thought I knew what it did. I was _there_."

"And now you're more than what you were." Gansey says. "Can you find out?"

Adam looks at the ground, then back at Gansey. "Maybe," he says.

Blue hisses out a low word that sounds like _ssssshit_. She's too far away for Henry to take her hand, or wrap his arm over her shoulders; he clasps his hands behind his back instead. He never considered the fact that Adam might be able to tell them the truth of Gansey's dreams; the destiny that's been closing in on them from both ends of the timeline.

Adam drops Gansey's hand like a feather in a vacuum. He rubs his own hand self-consciously against one thigh.

"This is why it's important. Gansey, do you consent to being the subject of a scrying spell, designed to illuminate exactly how Cabeswater resurrected you into your own body, and which may involve me seeing parts of your mind that you would prefer I didn't see?"

Gansey doesn't hesitate. "I consent."

Adam jerks his head toward the house. "Come on then. We might as well do this inside where it's comfortable."

* * *

**(high blood drumming on your skin)**

They saw the Grand Canyon in late August, on a day when the heat held in its heart the promise of fall, and the scope of what they'd seen stayed with them for the rest of the day. They were quiet that whole afternoon. Back at the motel, killing time while appetites built for dinner, the spell of it was still hanging over their heads. Blue and Gansey wouldn't drop one another's hands, and even Henry couldn't bring flippancy to the front of his mouth as easily as usual. He thought: something about beauty on that large a scale drives you further within your own skin. Not in a bad way, just making you more aware of where you end.

He lay on the motel bed, picking out the best of the near-hundred pictures he'd taken with his phone. The stepped surfaces of brownish orange reminded him of something. Towers. Tower of. Bibble babble brittle brutish; was he thinking of the thing itself, or the creator? Bits of words plucked at him. Henry breathed deeply until the one he wanted stopped wobbling and behaved.

Instead of googling it, he sent a picture to his mother along with the question: _Who did that Tower of Babel painting?_

It was five minutes before the reply came. _Breughel._

Babel, Breughel. Bibble babble. In the period of his childhood when his mother was interested in arts and artifacts more mundane than magical, Henry had been lifted up in her arms, in Vienna, to see that picture: the tower a work in progress, looking just as gouged-out and epic as the canyon had. Reaching from the sea to the clouds. It was a story about the failure of language as punishment for hubris. Henry sympathised.

A text notification appeared.

BLUE> we're bored. amuse us.

Henry didn't shift his eyes from his phone. He shot back, _amuse yourselves_ , followed by a kissy emoji repeated five times.

BLUE> ha ha. this is your fault anyway I could have been on the strip by now losing my fortune at roulette.

Henry hesitated, then typed, _what fortune?_

" _Henry_ ," said Gansey, but Blue was giggling.

Henry grinned and finally looked over. Blue was right. If they'd wanted to they could have pushed on to Las Vegas. Instead they were in a town called Kingman because, honestly, Henry had seen it on the map and found it amusing. Blue's legs dangled off the side of the bed, her shoulders and head resting in Gansey's lap where he was seated against the headboard. Gansey's hands were resting at her hairline and her stomach. They were beautiful. I'm aware of where I end, thought Henry. His skin was restless. He swallowed the jealousy before it could become too bitter.

"Wrestling contest," said Henry. "First person to get kicked off the bed buys dinner."

Blue rolled her eyes. "Nice try, Cheng, but--shit! _Gansey_!"

Henry gave a shout of laughter as Gansey's motionless hand became a tickling one, and then a pushing one. Blue's five feet two inches slid onto the floor as she tried to wriggle away from him, and she sprawled there with more indignant drama than the situation required.

"Dinner's on you," said Henry.

"Hope you like potato chips and Red Vines, asshole," said Blue.

Gansey got off the bed as well, and helped her up. When she was back on her feet he wrapped his arms around her, loose, and smiled down at her. "Sorry, Jane."

"You're not," said Blue.

Gansey leaned down. Henry should probably have looked away, but he was bored too, and he was only human. So he caught, where he'd never caught before, the fractional hesitation; the pinch of Blue's lips, the slight anxiety and the movement of her throat. Henry had never thought of Blue as anxious. He liked that she wasn't; it was good for him, for Gansey, to be around her  calm pragmatism.

"Don't mind me," Henry said, brightly; he was still hoping to dig an argument out of Blue to liven up the afternoon.

Instead Gansey sighed and said, "It's not you."

"Oh man," said Henry. "Is this a _thing_? Is Bluebell saving herself for marriage? Come cry on my shoulder, Dick." He lowered his brows into something absurd and suggestive. "Tell me all about your frustrations."

" _You're_ a dick," said Blue. Another treacherous giggle escaped her.

"It's…" Gansey looked at Blue.

Blue said, "It's the curse, alright? The prophecy."

"But--" Henry started.

"I _know_ ," said Blue. "But. I still spent months and months knowing that kissing Gansey on the mouth was going to kill him, so whenever I get near, it's like--someone spills coffee in my stomach."

"Huh," said Henry. "Can you kind of...start elsewhere, and hope the clumsy waitress of your stomach doesn't notice if you slip sideways in the heat of the moment?"

"God, you raven boys. Not everything is a request for problem-solving," said Blue, exasperated.

"Or you could just practice more, until the irrational fear goes away. You know the drill, Ganseyman."

"Please," Gansey said. "By all means, list your credentials to be giving us lessons in remedial kissing, Cheng."

Gansey was probably joking, but this was better entertainment than Henry had hoped for. He swung his legs over the bed to face them, and rattled off his credentials: Jenny Lee, Michael Robbins, and Bethany Zielinski, all of them last summer, all of them at the overachievers' camp he'd picked from the list his father sent, young leaders solving the problems of tomorrow. It was the kind of thing Henry actually enjoyed, not that he'd given his father the satisfaction of knowing it. It had been full of rich young people embarrassed about their parents' money, and angry young people with not nearly enough money to be embarrassed about.

"Only one for me," said Gansey.

"You know, this kind of arbitrary judgement based on number of partners is a ridiculous and, actually, sexist--"

"Sargent!" Henry grinned at her. "You're stalling."

"Two," Blue said irritably.

"Two..." Henry prompted.

The irritation was now the edged crankiness of someone determined not to be embarrassed.

"Noah."

" _Really_ ," said Henry. "Never mind. Tell me later. The fact remains: my credentials are good, or at least numerous."

Gansey's eyes were sparkling hilariously. "And you're going to tell me how to kiss my girlfriend?"

"Yeah, go on then." Blue stood between Henry's knees and gave him a look like the beginning of a staring contest.

In Henry's pocket, RoboBee began to buzz. No threat, Henry thought, ghosting his palm over it in a soothing motion, but his breath was quickening anyway. He shook his head sadly. "It wouldn't be fair to ruin you for all other men."

Blue narrowed her eyes and straddled him, seating herself in his lap, which they had done before. She put her hands on his face, which they hadn't. Her vowels were pure Henrietta. "You're so full of shit, Henry Cheng."

The freckle between her collarbones was right there, and Henry could feel the warm pressure of her and smell her girl-smell, fruity and spicy, like apple cider made with neither apples nor cloves. Something stranger and harder to capture. _Quince_ , said Henry's mind, and then _gam_ , as he lost control of the language and slipped into another.

Henry felt a small dip of his bed as Gansey moved and sat on the end of it. It was the closest he was going to get to permission, so he kissed Blue before any of them could think better of it. A brief, playful kiss, holding her chin. It was nice. Henry's body was shouting about all the places where her limbs were draped over his and he was _ignoring it_.

"Hmm," said Blue.

Then Gansey said, in a voice that Henry would have thrown himself front of armies for: "Is that really the best you can do?"

Mischief pulled Blue's lips into a smile and she leaned down again, all of her fingers snaking through Henry's hair. Henry's body, electrified, seized the reins. This one was immediately more serious. Blue kissed with a heat and determination that Henry met with delight, and with a sense of unreality. Blue made small noises into his mouth. His hands were at her waist. Henry would have melted into the sensation of it completely, if it weren't for the part of him that was as acutely aware of Gansey as you were aware of gravity at the top of a cliff.

Henry's legs wanted to lift and tangle, to pull Blue on top of him as he stretched out backwards, to settle into the bedclothes and kiss her until language was as useless for her as it sometimes was for him. It was a warning. He pulled his mouth away.

"I see," said Gansey. "Just like that, huh?"

Henry needed a moment. A lot of moments. Most of the words trying to come out were Korean again. His hands felt half numb, and they slipped down Blue's back as she climbed off him and knelt on the bed, closer to Gansey now. She put her own hands on Gansey's shoulders and this time there was no hesitation at all, though she did push their lips together with a speed that required her to re-adjust almost at once.

Gansey's mouth spread into a smile as it opened beneath Blue's. Blue's mouth which was still wet from kissing Henry. Blood plummeted through Henry's body. His jeans felt tight.

"You're welcome," Henry said. "You guys just--yeah, I'm gonna--"

He stood up, and waved at the motel bathroom. He was going to go and take a nice long hot shower with all the things he'd just added to his libido's arsenal.

He was stopped, as he moved past them, by a hand on his arm. It was Gansey, but both of them had broken apart and were looking at him. Blue's arm was still around Gansey's shoulders.

Henry had not been kidding, even a little bit, when he tossed T.H. White at Gansey. He knew exactly what kind of story he was living in; he'd known, on one level, by the end of the toga party. But it cracked through him anew, now, through the lightning rod of Gansey's touch: flashes of history, splintered universes all rhyming the same rhyme, the versions of the story where lust was strongest, or loyalty, or love. And those rare occasions where the three of them allowed themselves to be split down the middle, and found a balance.

Henry considered and discarded three different jokes, three different ways to brush this off, in favour of the truth. He let Gansey hold him in place.

A puzzled line split Gansey's brow; the splash of history had caught him too. His voice was hoarse. "I need to know what you want."

"No, my king, you don't," Henry said lightly. "You already know."

Gansey's eyes flickered to Blue, back to Henry, back to Blue. Back to Henry.

The thing was, Henry had spent the past two years wanting to kiss Richard Gansey. But it had always seemed to him that this was a comfortably rational state of being, Henry being a non-heterosexual teenager with a healthy libido and Gansey being _Gansey_ ; and besides, he'd also spent ten years wanting to kiss the version of Catherine Zeta-Jones who was in that Zorro movie. Neither of them were ever going to happen. The desire had very little to do with the actual people. And it had _zero_ to do with the Arthurian forces which were now trying to pull Henry into line with a narrative.

This person, this boy with warm knees and no taste in music and terrible courage propelling him into an unknown future, was a thing unto himself.

Henry said, "Tell me to kiss you," and Gansey did.

* * *

Inside, where it's comfortable, Adam and Gansey sit on the floor, facing one another over a plastic bowl of water. Adam's hands are back around Gansey's wrists, and Adam stares into the water with a pinched brow.

A perfect set of ripples appear on its surface, endlessly expanding circles that touch the bowl's rim and disappear, but are replenished from the centre. The tiny settling noises of the house, the calls of night-birds, all begin to fade. The silence in the room is such that when Adam speaks Henry almost flinches.

"Yes," Adam says. It sounds as though he is continuing a conversation. "I understand, but I want you to show me _how_. Step by step."

Ronan says, "Adam?" in a clear offer, and Adam gives a small shake of his head: _I've got this_. His chest is rising and falling quickly, the motion of it just visible beneath layers of shirt and sweater.

"Yes," Adam says again, and closes his eyes.

Later Henry isn't sure if it's RoboBee, perched on the edge of the bowl as if seeking nectar, or the presence of Blue, being her mirror self, which lets him plug so easily into what Adam is seeing. Or if the new strength of Cabeswater is what does it; or if Adam is more powerful than Adam himself knows. Or if it's just something about all of them being there in the room together, Gansey's people, the same people Cabeswater drew on to remake him in the first place.

The air shifts. Part of Henry's mind is grabbed, wrenched, thrown back months ago to when he was kneeling in the grass by the side of the road, numb with disbelief that his great adventure had ended this way. He felt completely stupid that earlier that day he had said, to Gansey, _I'm really too young to die._ He wanted to shake Gansey awake so that he could complain about it. Gansey was younger than he was, for fuck's sake.

Adam said, _If you asked--it might die for him._

Cabeswater, dying, asked: what makes a human being? And more, what makes _this_ human being, this one in particular?

The answer to which was both impossibly large, and easy, if you were someone who knew Gansey, and Cabeswater knew where to turn for instructions: to the people closest by, its own Greywaren and the knot of grievers around the corpse. It found richness there. It found the truest parts of Gansey. It found the name of _Owain Glendower_ and ran with it, rippling outwards, plucking that name and its associations from the minds of everyone else it touched, all the major players spread out along the leyline like pearls on a string, Gwenllian and Artemus and the Grey Man, even the shades of Noah and Persephone where they hovered just close enough to catch. Cabeswater flipped through them like Gansey's notebook, drawing on the memory of everyone involved, all of the twice-dead Richard Gansey and all of the long-dead Owain Glendower extracted and jumbled and pasted together; and all of it directed by Ronan and watched by Adam and mirrored through Blue. They had, all three of them, always seen a king when they looked at him.

Cabeswater asked: what makes a king?

And then Henry is back in the present, back in the Barns, with a pain like a bright needle between his eyes, looking at Adam and Gansey. Between the two of them is an empty bowl. Adam unwraps his fingers from Gansey's wrists.

"The Raven King," says Gansey. He sounds almost angry. "Put together from scraps."

In researching the past Gansey was creating his own future. It's still not fair, but it's something. It's a kind of meaning pulled out of the wreckage. Henry goes to him and gets a hand under Gansey's arm, helping him to his feet. He makes careful adjustments; when Gansey sways, it won't be obvious.

"You're making my knees ache," Henry says. "Come sit on the furniture like a civilised being."

He more or less bullies Gansey onto one of the russet sofas, and bookends Gansey with himself and Blue. This is a familiar arrangement, already. Adam perches on the arm of Ronan's chair; Ronan hands him a glass of water without speaking, and Adam drains almost half of it.

Then Ronan says, like it's nothing, "So you're the new Glendower?"

"Yes. No." Gansey shrugs. "Some of his memories, but not his life."

Henry laughs. "Seriously, Richardman? You've got a court full of magicians and you're in love with a tree-light. How much more do you need?"

Gansey blinks and exchanges a glance with Blue. Apparently this has never occurred to them before.

Henry muffles another burst of laughter in one of Ronan's cushions. "I just hope your future daughter manages to have a bit more sense than Gwenny-dear."

Gansey says, faintly bitter, "It's not like I'm going to be having Glendower's kind of adventure now."

"I think it'll find you," Ronan says. "Give it time."

Henry tries to catch Ronan's eye, meaning to excavate a little of the meaning there, but his gaze is hijacked by Adam's instead.

"So what does that make you?" Adam asks him.

"A ring-in," Henry says brightly. Blue and Gansey both make lazy sounds of protest. "Oh, by rights, my liege, you should have a bard. You'll notice I am uniquely _un_ qualified for that position."

"Not a bard," Adam says. He taps at his phone and then holds it out. "A chronicler."

Henry half-stands, leaning across the space to take Adam's phone. He scrolls up and up a text conversation between Adam and himself which is barely a conversation at all. Mostly, it's pictures. The particular mental curation that Henry applied when sending pictures to Adam was half-conscious, at the time. Looking at them now, all of them arranged together, it's pretty obvious. _Here's my hunger_ , Henry was saying; _I think you of all people might understand._ Adam's right. He was chronicling something, and his voice was part of the story.

Gansey, looking at Adam's phone as Henry scrolls, puts out a hand and touches the screen; the phone is momentarily confused by the double input, but unfreezes after a second. 

"That was at Dawn's, wasn't it?"

Henry nods. Dawn was a friend of Maura's, a surprisingly grand Southern lady living in an equally grand Southern house. They stayed with her for a recovery week, the three of them footsore and irritable and homesick in equal measure. They drank iced tea and lay around doing glorious amounts of nothing, replenishing themselves, reconnecting.

Henry remembers taking the photo Gansey is pointing at. He doesn't remember slapping a greyscale filter over it, but it was a good choice. Gansey in the picture is wearing his glasses, curled up in an old-fashioned window seat with his notebook in his lap and a cat sprawled across his feet. Odd light, rainy light, splashes down over him. He looks solemn and worn out. Henry's mouth aches to kiss that version of Gansey.

"It's very..." Gansey says. His fingertip traces the angles of his own body and then he draws it back, as if embarrassed. He looks at Henry as though finding something new in his face.

"You know I took just as many of Blue," Henry says, feeling compelled to explain. "I think Lynch got more of them. And Cheng Two, of course."

"Of course," says Blue. "The legs guy."

"I would have appreciated Blue's legs," says Adam. "They're wasted on Ronan."

Gansey gives a startled laugh. Henry can't help eyeing Adam's own long legs as he hands the phone back. If Adam's relaxed to the point of mild flirtation, Henry's going to play along. That seems to be the key to friendship, with these people. Every time they up the ante, with magic or sharpness or intimacy, you call. You throw your chips into the circle and cheerfully bluff your way through.

"Ronan seems to be doing just fine for himself in the legs department," Henry says.

Now it's Adam who laughs. Ronan's chin moves like a bird listening for song.

"Chronicler," says Blue. "I like that."

Henry's chosen system has found the balance: neatly and precariously, on three points. He exists within it as the present moment that Gansey and Blue require, being as they are so deeply entwined with the past and the future respectively.

"I want another drink," Gansey says. He claps a hand each on Blue's and Henry's knees and levers himself to his feet. "Who's in?"

* * *

**(the man who's coming home with you)**

"Henry, come on," said Gansey. "Pull over, we'll wait it out."

Henry would have argued about his driving prowess, but he was getting sick of inching along and flinching at the blurred headlights that occasionally swum out of the gloom; and besides, he usually did what Gansey's voice wanted him to do. He slowed and edged them off onto a shoulder of the road, then cut the engine.

They were an hour south of Seattle and the thunderstorm had come from nowhere, disguising itself as part of the general dull greyness of the sky until it was right above them, loud and apocalyptic, throwing down water like someone up there was stuck in a leaking dinghy and bailing for their life.

"Hey," Blue said suddenly. Both Gansey and Henry turned around to look at her. She'd already undone her seatbelt, and stretched her legs all the way along the back seat. "It's Halloween tomorrow."

"Hey, yeah," said Henry.

The rain was fantastically atmospheric, but all of the spooky stories they tossed around fell flat. None of them could come up with anything more frightening than Adam's eyes and Adam's hands as the demon took him over, or Ronan choking, or Gansey's face as he prepared to die. Real fear shook something loose inside you, Henry thought, something that couldn't ever be wedged back into place.

Once they'd given up on that, they played drinking games without drinking anything more than a bottle of Coke, which they passed around anyway because, as Blue said, half the point of the game was digging your thumbs into everyone else's sore points.

She said, by way of illustration, "I've never had to sit through an entire Greek class."

"Cruel," Henry said bleakly, letting Gansey slap the bottle into his hand. "Maybe we could think of a game that's got less to do with the past?"

Blue showed them her teeth. "I've never once had to draw up a pros and cons list to choose between Harvard and Yale."

Henry and Gansey looked at one another.

"Is it me," said Henry, "or is she taking all the fun out of this?"

"I've never been tempted--"

Gansey coughed on a mouthful of soda. "Jane, isn't it someone else's turn?"

Blue brushed this aside. "I've never been tempted to kiss a girl."

"What." Henry stared at her. "Not even--not even a little?"

Blue made a magnificent face. Gansey muttered something that sounded like, _Orla_ , and Blue spluttered, "Richard Gansey, she's my _cousin_!" and kicked him in the arm.

"Very Greek," said Henry, and got a kick of his own.

The rain tapped and tapped on the roof of the car. The air was thick. And then, between one moment and the next, the enclosed space was too much for Henry. He _could_ have stayed there; he knew how to exist in holes, it was important that he knew how. But he didn't have to.

He opened his door, breaking the cave-like spell of Dr Seuss's interior.

"Henry--" said Blue.

"Stay here," Henry told RoboBee. It flicked its wings sharply: as if I'd be so stupid as to go out in _that_ , this seemed to say.

Henry was exactly that stupid. The rain had relented to a constant drizzle; Henry shoved his hands into his pockets and hunched his shoulders against it, and took a few lung-expanding strides away from the car. Even with the heaviness of the clouds the sky was very far away. The air smelled like moss and like concrete, and a little like chlorine. Henry watched a leaf, curled up in a finicky knot, drift on a rivulet past the toe of his shoe. His hand was in his pocket searching for his phone before he remembered that it was on his seat, in the dry, along with two people he'd handed over his heart to long before it even occurred to him to query it and find it claimed.

You are barely an adult, he told himself. This is a fucking ridiculous situation to be in.

His heart said: _nevertheless._

A car door slammed behind him. Henry turned.

"Mar-co," Gansey called.

"Oh, clever," Henry called back. "Because it's wet."

Gansey came closer. Water was already trickling down his handsome features: the aristocratic slope of his nose, the promise of his mouth. He looked worried. "Marco," he said again, softer.

Henry thought about the game they were not really playing, a lifeline thrown out, a verbal seeking, like the underwater songs of whales and dolphins, waiting for the sound to be thrown back and show them the shape of the world. Henry's heart battered at him. He imagined the sine wave of it bouncing off the symmetry of Gansey's jaw and returning to glow in the shelter of Henry's ribs.

"Polo," he said, and heard his voice go thin.

And then Gansey's hands were on his face, Gansey's mouth hot against his. Henry pulled Gansey close, kissed him hungrily. Henry Cheng had managed to make his way through most of his life without taking anything too seriously; he could feel himself trying to shy away from this, to make it less than it was. He kissed Gansey like he was taking a picture, capturing it for posterity. Remember this. Remember this.

"Come on, Cheng," Gansey said. "I don't know if you've noticed, but it's horrible out here."

Henry followed him back to Dr Seuss. He went to get back into the driver's seat, but Gansey had opened one of the back doors and was motioning impatiently for Henry to climb in, so he did. He squelched his way into the middle of the back seat neat to Blue, and Gansey followed, so that they were all three of them snug in the back of the car. Henry only noticed how tight his throat was once the door was closed again, shutting them in. Part of him noted that sitting in the centre like this meant he wasn't staring at the back of a seat; he could see right through to the dashboard, the windshield, and beyond. He put his hands on his knees and inhaled through his nose.

"So," Blue said. 'We think we know what that was about."

"Oh, Christ," said Henry. "You've turned into a _we_ couple. I knew it was only a matter of time. Let me go and drown myself in the rain, please."

He scrabbled showily at the door handle, reaching across Gansey, who grabbed hold of Henry's hands and pushed them back again.

" _We've_ been talking," said Gansey, deadly with sincerity. "About the future. And about what we're doing, here. With you."

"I thought we'd defined _road trip_ for you already--"

"Henry." Blue elbowed him. "Shut up."

Henry loved her, he did, but he didn't take direction from her. He smiled first in one direction and then the other. "Don't worry, I know the story. Dick and Jane go on a journey! Dick and Jane have a fling with their friend who's along for the ride! Dick and Jane tactfully explain that although they _like_ their friend, they don't _like_ -like--"

Gansey's hand landed on Henry's mouth. He and Blue exchanged a very _we_ kind of look.

"Told you so," said Blue.

Gansey sighed. He removed his hand, but ran it through the front of Henry's rain-flattened hair, three times, a soothing motion that made a small muscle between Henry's shoulder blades unlock.

"I was meant to be using this trip to work out who I am without the hunt for Glendower," Gansey said. "And it sort of worked, I think. I like who I've been, with you, with both of you. All my memories of these months are like a rope woven from three strands. I can't imagine you not being there, Henry."

Blue said, "When we get back to Henrietta, when we go wherever we're going after that--we want you there. _With_ us."

Henry's mouth had gone dry, in defiance of the humid air. "Will that. Will that even work?"

Gansey shrugged. "That's what we're finding out, isn't it? It might not work forever. But we won't know if we don't give it a shot."

"Three people is--"

"Stable," said Blue. "Next objection."

He _was_ objecting. It felt like the worst kind of self-sabotage, which was not Henry's style in the least. But also, somehow, necessary. Like shaking a structure, testing it for weaknesses.

He duly said, "We're only eighteen. I'm sure we're supposed to be--building credentials. Sowing oats. Discovering ourselves."

"As you keep pointing out, I've died twice," said Gansey. He was so bright that Henry almost wanted to look away from him, and so compelling that he couldn't. "I don't care what I'm _supposed_ to be doing. And that's your three denials. Are we done now? Can we move on to the part where you say yes?"

Henry exhaled. He was afraid, and very happy.

"Yes," he said.

* * *

"You guys need coffee?" Henry calls, leaning out of the door. He stifles a yawn with the back of his hand and feels the chill trying to sneak down inside the neckline of his warm henley. "A non-Parrish space heater? Anything?"

"We're good," Gansey calls back.

Adam and Gansey are sitting side by side on the paved back porch, shoulders touching, Gansey's magician satisfying a very particular kind of hunger. The night is deep and cold, the stars sleepily distant. Henry shivers again and closes the door. He goes into the kitchen, where Ronan is screwing the cap back onto a bottle of water while Blue digs through the refrigerator. She has a grazing style of food intake, which Henry puts down to the chaotic nature of life at 300 Fox Way. On the trip, they got used to stashing boxes of crackers in Dr Seuss's glove compartment, and Henry took to keeping granola bars in his pockets.

Blue turns around with a blue enamel pie tin in her hands and says, "Isn't this Calla's?"

The tin holds a lone slice of pie that looks citrusy. Blue kicks the fridge shut and opens drawers until she finds a fork, then hops up to sit on the large wooden table. She pulls the cling film off the tin and proceeds to feed herself the rest of the pie.

"Yeah," says Ronan. "Calla's tin, your mom's pie. I'm being backseat fucking parented. Or Opal is."

Blue slides the fork slowly out of her mouth, looking thoughtful. "This is gonna sound weird," she says, "but I never thought of my mom as really _maternal_."

RoboBee drifts over to her and lands on her hand. It walks loving circles around her wrist, a live accessory. Now there's a thought. Henry snaps a picture of it and fires off a text to his father, not bothering to calculate the time difference.

Ronan shrugs. "You quit town for six months. Maybe she got bored."

"Oh, God," says Blue, sounding kind of horrified. "Are you _friends_ with my mom now?"

"Sure," Ronan drawls. "Apparently friends don't let friends raise magic children without constantly shoving their noses in."

Henry can't blame the women of 300 Fox Way for deciding to participate, and for making sure that leaving a child in the full-time care of Ronan Lynch, eighteen-year-old farmer and professional dreamer and ex-delinquent, isn't a wholly terrible idea.

"Don't be--" Blue wisely shuts her mouth on what Henry's ninety percent sure was going to be the Ganseyesque word _disingenuous_ , and instead waves her fork at Ronan "--a stubborn shithead. The Barns isn't a fairy kingdom, you know, it's still in _Virginia_. Does she have a social security number? Shouldn't she go to school?"

"Now _you_ sound like Maura," says Ronan, in a crushing tone likely designed to start a fight. But Blue Sargent, while as willing as ever to leap into any fray she deems worth her time, has gotten cannier in the last few months. Henry was on the Aglionby debate team for two years, and Gansey's entire upbringing was its own kind of model UN. Blue's learned to jump over her share of verbal tripwires.

"You're derailing because I'm right," she shoots back, hard and sharp. Her eyes are brilliant; the table has become a throne. Henry indulges in a moment of smugness regarding how lucky he is, that this girl lets him listen to her secrets and touch her breasts and rant sleepily at her about how he's going to fix all the issues with America's inefficient charitable organisations. 

Blue looks sidelong and catches Henry with his phone lifted, capturing her.

"Perfect," Henry says. "This one's going to your mother."

The front door closes, and Adam and Gansey wander in. Adam walks to Ronan and takes the water bottle from his hands, leaning back against him, head in the crook of Ronan's neck. Henry has the sense of being lucky to be seeing this, as easy and calm as it is; Adam Parrish has always struck him as the type to be intensely private with his affections. It wouldn't be happening except in this house, with these people. Ronan's hands tuck into the front pockets of Adam's jeans, Ronan's arms curling around him like tree branches. Adam's sleepy cheekbones have gone savage in the light, and RoboBee hums as it pushes off from Blue and hovers near them, like it's thinking of giving off sparks.

"Take a picture, Cheng," Ronan drawls. His mouth is buried in Adam's hair, each word halfway to being a kiss. "It'll last longer."

Henry does.

* * *

**(in your hand, the birth of a new day)**

The sun dipped into the ocean and set most of the sky alight. There was a cloudless patch of grey-blue in the centre that refused to be lit, just faded, slow and obstinate.

"It's like something from an alien planet," said Blue.

"Sure," said Henry generously.

Blue rolled over on the blanket, kicking up a bit of sand with her toes, and slapped Henry's ankle. "Not all of us have lived in Vancouver."

"You're going to get sand in the fries," Henry told her. He pulled the lid carefully off the small plastic container of ketchup, and nestled it in the centre of the steaming fries.

Blue dipped two fries in at once and stuck them in her mouth, making a face at Henry as she did so.

“This moment needs a soundtrack," Gansey declared.

Henry flicked to the music on his phone before anyone else could volunteer. They'd well and truly made it to the present day when it came to road trip music, even with a few detours to explore Gansey's newfound enthusiasm for nineties girl-rock and so that Henry, in his occasional surges of nostalgia for Litchfield House and Cheng Two's surreptitious Broadway obsession, could blast Andrew Lloyd Webber and sing dreadfully along.

But now he tapped the Greatest Hits of the Beach Boys, because they were in California and they were at the beach, and because he knew it would make Gansey smile.

"I can't believe it's December," Blue said.

"I know," said Henry, "it can't be less than sixty degrees."

She threw a fry at him. "You know what I mean."

"This is the furthest point," Gansey said softly. "This is where we turn around."

Turn around, and head for home. They'd allowed a leisurely eight days for that leg of the journey, which would put them back in town a week before Christmas. Henrietta wasn't _home_ for Henry the way it was for Blue and Gansey--his home was as portable as anything else on two legs, these days--but he was looking forward to it anyway. Ronan had broken his usual technological silence to send them all pizza emojis, which was apparently an invitation of some sort.

Bits of the sky were now both purple and yellow at once. Henry took a picture of the sunset (for Adam) and of his bare feet buried in the sand (for Bella, the youngest of his sisters, who liked to tell him that small details were more authentic than classic vistas). He took one of Blue and Gansey (for himself) and then set his phone down in the centre of the picnic blanket, a safe distance from the ketchup.

 _God only knows what I'd be without you_ , the phone sang.

Henry wriggled his feet deeper in the sand, wrapped his hands around his knees, and watched the glowing defiance of colour theory taking place at the horizon.

* * *

Henry wakes and isn't sure what woke him. It might have been the cold; he pulls the corner of the blanket higher where it's slipped down his body. It might have been the dawn light, pale and watery.

He sits up, trying not to make any sudden movements, and looks around the room. Blue is still asleep on the air mattress next to him, curled into a comma with the blanket tucked up high around her face so that only a few tufts of black hair are showing. To his other side Henry can see the back of Ronan's head, and the end of Adam's arm emerging from under Ronan's neck. They are lying on a mattress dragged down from upstairs, beneath a incongruous mass of patchworked wool that Henry remembers from an exchange of photos with Gwenllian, who was learning to crochet at about the same time she was--terrifyingly--learning how to use Twitter. Another domestic gift from the psychic household.

Ronan obviously has his own room, and there are enough spare bedrooms in the Barns to house them all comfortably, but the later the party lingered last night, the less any of them felt like breaking it up. They stayed down here, like children at a sleepover. Half-awake, feeling the peace of the room like a balm, Henry is intensely glad of it.

He looks over at the armchair nearest to the window, where Gansey is seated, awake and still, under a blanket of his own. The morning light frames him from behind. Henry's breath stops. If the kitchen table was a throne for Blue, then Henry has no words for what this is, for what he's seeing now.

It's a tipping-over hour of the morning. Boundaries are thin.

Henry lets language tumble blurrily through his mind until he plucks the word _vigil_ out of the stream.

"My king," he says quietly.

Gansey turns his head, smiling.

"Sleep," Gansey says. "I've got this."

**Author's Note:**

> Endless thanks to Anna & Kelsey for input and enthusiasm and pointing out where Australianisms had slipped in. Fic title and flashback section headings are from various songs of the GLORIOUS 80s, which is of course the only true road trip soundtrack of heroes.
> 
> And there really is a town in Arizona called Kingman.
> 
> fahye.tumblr.com

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] we built this city](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13047873) by [growlery](https://archiveofourown.org/users/growlery/pseuds/growlery)




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